this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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$60k per MW or $210M for a nuclear reactors worth (3.5GW). Sure... the reactor will go 24/7 (between maintenance and refuelling down times, and will use less land (1.75km² Vs ~40km²) but at 1% of the cost, why are we still talking about nuclear.
(I'm using the UKs Hinckley Point C power station as reference)
Because there are nights there are winters there are cloudy and rainy days, and there are no batteries capable of balancing all of these issues. Also when you account for those batteries the cost is going to shift a bit. So we need to invest in nuclear and renewables and batteries. So we can start getting rid of coal and gas plants.
You better be bringing units if you're going to be claiming this.
Still less than half of the LCOE of nuclear when storage is added: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1475611/global-levelized-cost-of-energy-components-by-technology/
Given that both solar and storage costs are trending downwards while nuclear is not, this basically kills any argument for nuclear in the future. It's not viable on its face - renewables + storage is the definitive future.
And cheaper solar and batteries permits cheaper Hydrogen which provides unlimited and 100% resilient renewable power, and still cheaper than nuclear.
I have a generally negative impression of hydrogen because many of the intended use-cases seem to be a cover story for the gas industry to keep existing, which it very much should not be any more.
Do you know any use-cases where hydrogen is truly warranted, outside for example steel production, which I think might be legit?
But Germany has no space for nuclear waste. They haven't been able to bury the last batch for over 30 years. And the one that they buried most recently began to leak radioactivity into ground water.
And.. why give Russia more military target opportunities?
I'm not a rabid anti-nuclear, but there are somethings that are often left out of the pricing. One is the exorbitant price of storage of spent fuel although I seem to remember that there is some nuclear tech that can use nuclear waste as at least part of it's fuel (Molten salt? Pebble? maybe an expert can chime in). There is also the human greed factor. Fukushima happened because they built the walls to the highest recorded tsunami in the area, to save on concrete. A lot of civil engineering projects have a 150% overprovision over the worst case calculations. Fukushima? just for the worst case recorded, moronic corporate greed. The human factor tends to be the biggest danger here.
Another example that gets skimmed over or ignored is the massive cost of decommissioning a nuclear power plant. It typically ranges from $280 million to $2 billion, depending on the technology used. More complex plants can be up to $4 billion. And the process can take 15 to 30 years to complete.
Those are less competitive, and salt reactor attempts have historically caused terminating corrosion problems. The SMR "promise" relies on switching extremely expensive/rare/dangerous plutonium level enriched fuel, that rely on traditional reactors for enrichment, for slightly lower capital costs.
If France can find space, surely Germany can.
You're using factors of less than 10 to argue against a factor of 100.
The batteries needed are a lot less than you might think. Solar doesn't work at night and the wind doesn't always blow, but we have tons of regional weather data about how they overlap. From that, it's possible to calculate the maximum historical lull where neither are providing enough. You then add enough storage to handle double that time period, and you're good.
Getting 95% coverage with this is a very achievable goal. That last 5% takes a lot more effort, but getting to 95% would be a massive reduction in CO2 output.
I think there's a contingent of people who think nuclear is really, really cool. And it is cool. Splitting atoms to make power is undeniably awesome. That doesn't make it sensible, though, and they don't separate those two thoughts in their mind. Their solution is to double down on talking points designed for use against Greenpeace in the 90s rather than absorbing new information that changes the landscape.
And then there's a second group that isn't even trying to argue in good faith. They "support" nuclear knowing it won't go anywhere because it keeps fossil fuels in place.
What isn't sensible about nuclear? For context, I'm coming from the US in an area with lots of empty space (i.e. tons of place to store radioactive waste) and without much in the way of hydro (I'm in Utah, a mountainous, desert climate). We get plenty of sun as well as plenty of snow. Nuclear should provide power at night and throughout the winter, and since ~89% of homes are heated with natural gas, we only need higher electricity production in the summer when it's hot, which is precisely what solar is great for.
So here's my thought process:
If we had a nuclear plant in my area, we could replace our coal plants, as well as some of our natural gas plants. If we go with solar, I don't think we have great options for electricity storage throughout the winter.
This is obviously different in the EU, but surely the nordic countries have similar problems as we do here, so why isn't nuclear more prevalent there?
Because it makes no sense, environmentally or economically speaking. Nuclear is, as you said, base load. It can't adjust for spikes in demand. So if there's more energy in the grid than needed, it's gonna be solar and wind that gets turned off to balance the grid. Investments in nuclear thus slow down the adoption of renewables.
Solar is orders of magnitude cheaper to build, while nuclear is one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity, even discounting the waste storage, which gets delegated the the public.
Battery technology has been making massive gains in scalability and cost in recent years. What we need is battery arrays to cover nighttime demand and spikes in production or demand, combined with a more adaptive industry that performs energy intensive tasks when it's abundant. With countries that have large amounts of solar, it is already happening that during peak production, energy cost goes to zero (or even negative, as traded between utilities companies).
About the heating: gas can not stay the main way to heat homes, it's yet another fossil fuel. What we need is heat pumps, which can have an efficiency of >300% (1kWh electricity gets turned into 3kWh of heat, by taking ambient heat from outside). Combined with large, well-insulated warm-water reservoirs, you can heat up more water than you need to higher temperature during times of electricity oversupply, and have more than enough to last you the night, without even involving batteries. Warm water is an amazing energy storage medium. Batteries cover electricity demand as well as a backup in case you need uncharacteristically much water. This is a system that's slowly getting adopted in Europe, and it's great. Much cheaper, and 100% clean.
You bring up heated water as a method of storage, and it reminds me of a neighborhood in Alberta, Canada that uses geothermal + solar heated water storage for 52 homes. They've been able to successfully heat the entire neighborhood with only solar over the winter in 2015-2016 and have gotten > 90% solar heating in other years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community
There's a huge number of new storage technologies being developed, and the fact that some even work on a seasonal basis for long term storage is amazing.
We also should consider HVDC lines. The longest one right now is in Brazil, and it's 1300 miles long. With that kind of range, wind in Nebraska can power New York, solar in Arizona can power Chicago, and hydro all around the Mississippi river basin can store it all. We may have enough pumped hydro already that we might not even need batteries, provided we can hook it all up.
HVDC is much more expensive than Hydrogen pipelines, which doubles as storage and transmission, and can provide continent wide resilience, even when local renewables provide much cheaper power when it is available than either long distance electric or H2 power.
The land thing isn't anywhere near enough of a concern for me, especially when dual uses of land are quite feasible.
24/7 is just about over commissioning and having storage. Build 10x as much and store what you generate. At those sorts of levels even an overcast day generates.
Using the remaining 99% of the cost to bury batteries underground would seem reasonable.
Batteries can be containerized in modules, with a turnkey connection that remains mobile. Solar can use those containers as support structure. Hydrogen electrolyzer/fuel cells can also be built in same containers.